Hi there, I’m currently looking into renting a domain from cloudflare for convenient access to my hosted services from outside my home. It seems some of the cheapest options for the domain name I want to use are country TLDs (.uk, .us). Does this bind me to their laws in any way? can anyone come at me for hosting (e.g. Illegally downloaded content) on their TLD?
Regardless, is there any reason I shouldn’t use cloudflare for this? any drawbacks I should be aware of?
Edit: I should mention I’m currently using duckdns for free and the reason I want to move is that it seems some organizations (like my university and workplace) block duckdns (for reasons beyond me).
Edit 2: So to my understanding there’s not a big one, but some risk involved, so I think I’ll pay a bit more for a non-ccTLD. Thanks everyone!
It does not, but whoever controlling those domains may have their own rules about who may use them, and terminate your account if they feel you’ve broken their rules.
One common rule is that you have to actually be a person or company in that location. I know that’s true for .eu (which was real fun for brexit), probably for .uk, but I don’t think it’s a requirement for .us.
If you really want that name, I’d pick a non-ccTLD and pay a bit more.
Thanks for the quick reply! Assuming I host a Jellyfin instance for instance (pun intended), can they actually accuse me of breaking rules without a valid login? afaik for non-users the login page is as far as they (should be able to) go. As for the domain name, I’m not actually set on one specific name, but it seemed from the few I tried that .uk and .us are consistently much cheaper (~$5/yr as opposed to ~$10/yr).
If anyone asks you’re just hosting home videos ;) No one can bust you for that.
Any reason those $5/yr in difference are worth the risk?
It’s just that I don’t know if there even is a risk… if there’s no risk I’d rather just pay less.
There is a risk. For example, Libya seized this .ly name for violating their laws.